On Wednesday, October 18, ISK kicked off the first lecture in our series Understanding Strategic Botnets: The challenge of machine-generated strategic communication. The series, with further events to be announced soon, is financed by Plattformen to make students, citizens and professional communicators more aware of social bots and their strategic deployment by operators who wish to influence public debates and, ultimately, political decisions.

During the US presidential election, awareness of the political ramifications of social bots rose considerably. Experts estimated, for example, that one-fifth of pro-Clinton and one-third of pro-Trump tweets during and after the first presidential debate in September 2016 were not written by humans but machine-generated, with nets of bots echoing each other. What is less discussed is the more important question: So what?

‘Psychological warfare is not about being liked. It’s about affecting the adversary’s will to act.’ Matthew Armstrong (left) and Dr. James Pamment (right).

So what? is declaredly the favourite question of our first guest speaker. Matt Armstrong is an expert in media politics, public diplomacy and psychological warfare who has worked extensively with the US government and advising NATO and other military and security communities. In his talk, Matt drew the audience’s attention away from the mere technology and techniques of bot-employment and invited us to see the big, the political picture. Matt showed that bots are the digital version of destabilization-tactics well-known from the political warfare of the 1950ies and 60ies. He warned that their potential impact in today’s socio-political environment is far greater because an individual’s potential to cause disruption, not just destruction, is far greater than ever before. The mechanism is simple: botnets may influence individuals by pretending that there are a multitude of like-minded people out there. Bot effectiveness is both enabled and amplified by self-censorship imposed by individuals, decreasing trust or interest in professional news media, and the disappearance of traditional barriers of distance, language, and culture that is reshaping national identities, national security, and thus national agendas. Matt made the point that not long ago ‘I heard it on the Internet’ was derogatory but now it is a label of authority for many. These machine-driven networks, which may only have a bot-herder behind them, leverage these vulnerabilities to manufacture and push impressions that spark an individual’s will to act, through words or deeds. And affecting the will to act, as Matt said to communicators engaged in or affected by political warfare, is what counts in the end.

Bots are computer entities that impersonate social media users and automatically endorse (like) and recirculate (retweet, repost) the content favoured by their controllers. In recent years, they have become an important factor in political communication. In an age in which the visibility of one’s strategic communication depends on popularity-driven social media algorithms, armies of bots, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands, can deliver the fake social proof needed to tip the scales. We at ISK believe that a firm understanding of strategic botnets and machine-generated strategic communication is key knowledge for communicators. So we hope to see you at the next event!

The month of March was a busy month for me, and it was all about two words: sustainability and partnerships.

In the beginning of the month I was at the United Nations in New York, spending a full week interviewing staff at the Sustainable Development Goals Fund. The SDG-F is a remarkable organisation because all its work centres on building partnerships between governments, businesses, civil society and UN agencies. They usually find different kinds of donors who are willing to provide matching funds for projects, which means (at least) double the impact.

Besides being incredibly inspiring, I was left with the feeling that all kinds of projects, including teaching and research, could benefit from this way of working. Good models for public-private partnerships are endlessly replicable and sustainable. Finding ways to blend different skills, knowledge and resources is a fantastic ability inherent to good communicators, and I hope all of our students understand the importance of being able to work with different kinds of people and to encourage them to work together.

After a few days back in the office I was off to England to participate in a conference on the future of diplomacy at Wilton Park, which is an agency of the UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office. It is based at a stately home in some of the most idealistic countryside you’ll ever see, apparently because that helps participants think better. Again, much of the discussion focused on partnerships and the importance of good communication skills. Future diplomats will be skilful communicators capable of harnessing the energy of different parts of society, and to do that they need to get better at working with others.

Then it was back to Helsingborg for the start of a MSc course about strategy, communication planning, research and evaluation. Although that might all sound very theoretical, most of the course is practical. This year, I reached an agreement that the SDG-F would provide the students with real communication problems, and the students are currently designing robust, measurable campaigns that are ready to implement. You may see them around Campus in groups of five, looking very stressed. Please be kind to them.

This is a new kind of partnership both for us and the SDG-F, and who knows what new ideas it will generate and where it will lead? Following on from the project our second year undergraguates did last year in cooperation with Facebook and the US State Department (you may remember the brilliant Färgstarkare Tillsammans), I’m convinced that these kinds of partnerships offer a new dimension to our education programmes. I’ve never been so proud of a group of students as those who worked on Färgstarkare Tillsammans, and especially the group who went to the OSCE Ministerial Meeting in Hamburg to present their work.

I’m interested to hear what our students and teachers think about these kinds of partnerships. Should we have more of them? Should they be intergrated into more courses? Or should we keep the classroom completely separate from the practice? One thing is clear: partnerships are the future, and we need to ensure that our students have theoretical and practical knowledge of how to harness the strengths of others. But how? Please share your thoughts.

The Uppsala University Hospital where the study was conducted during autumn 2016

Last month, my colleague Åsa Thelander and I got our paper “Curated participation: A study of everyday photography in organisational communication strategy” accepted for the 67th International Communication Association Conference (ICA), which this year is held in San Diego, US. The paper is part of a larger project in which we examine the relation between visual digital media, co-creation and participation among citizens and employees in public organisations (see more examples here and here). In this paper, we analyse how employees experience their participation in a strategic social media initiative launched to improve the reputation of a public hospital. What, how and why do participants post? What kind of relationships is formed through participation? Participants’ experiences of curating images at Instagram are examined through the lens of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory of social life. Participation in a communication strategy based on visual social media is likened to a theatre performance, where the participants act on a stage. Scripts, roles, fronts, props, setting and the team performance are central concepts that are used to make sense of participants’ experiences. The study demonstrates that studying participants’ experiences of performing visual communication strategies is useful to understand the consequences of everyday photographic practice for employee engagement and organisational reputation. Participants interpreted and performed the task differently by – for example – taking on different fronts or carrying out the task as a team. Consequences for organisational engagement of this type of communication strategy is discussed, not least the downside of the strategy, which is often neglected in previous research.

To use visual social media with the aim of creating engagement among employees and reinvigorate organisational reputation is far from straightforward. In contrast to the authentic and ‘real’ image that photographs are believed to deliver, Instagram photography convey the positive well-known and impersonal image of the organisation. Yet, visual social media was found to involve a distinct and more holistic way of representing work life in the organisation as compared to representations in the official communication channels. Visual social media, however, was found to involve a high degree of interaction, but little interactivity. The lack of interactivity may indicate an overly strong belief in previous research on what social media can accomplished in terms of engagement.

One of the privileges in my job is that I regularly get to meet and discuss interesting topics and ideas with students. In the course on strategic brand communication that I am currently teaching on our master of science programme in strategic communication, we recently discussed Sarah Banet-Weiser’s book Authentic: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture(see also my previous post on her work and a text about her concept of commodity activism here). The book makes an interesting contribution to traditional brand management literature by examining branding from a socio-cultural perspective. Drawing on a range of arresting examples (from the Dove real beauty campaign and Tila Tequila to Christianity), Banet-Weiser shows how the logic of branding governs contemporary culture and merges with everyday life. To capture the essence of the book, the students made some fantastic artistic posters – a collage of which I share with you here.

Collage of posters presented at the literature seminar in January 2017

A returning question in my research and teaching recently is how, when and why citizens, employees and consumers engage in communication campaigns and what makes them contribute to strategic initiatives launched by organisations. The protest action women’s march on Washington that was held last month offers an avenue to explore this question. The protest march united millions of men and women worldwide.

Today we are exposed to activism in marketing and branding campaigns that promises a better world through consumption The communication scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) calls this phenomenon commodity activism. She argues that the problem with commodity activism, however, is that it does not lead to structural change, since we cannot consume our way out of the problems related to consumption. The women’s march is conditioned upon a different type of activism, which is perhaps why the protest was so fruitful. In part the initiative involved the grassroots movement of the pussy hats project, which centred around the practice of knitting and distributing pink beanies with cat ears to marchers; it was also popular to share them in various social media. It is perhaps no coincidence that the project focused on knitting – a traditional female domestic chore that has been reclaimed and valued by feminists. In her re-reading of the epic the Odyssey, the philosopher Adriana Cavarero re-interprets this type of mundane practices as sites of resistance.

In the ancient Greek narrative about Odysseus wanderings at sea, his wife Penelope waits for him at home. She weaves a cloth to fend of the suitors that stand outside her door ready to replace Odysseus on the throne. But the cloth is not the purpose of her weaving; the purpose is to prolong her time in freedom. In order to postpone her answer to the suitors, she weaves by day and secretly unweaves the same cloth by night. The endless work of weaving and unweaving creates an interim time. Upon Odysseus return Penelope’s time come to an end. When a permanent order establishes itself, her time is gone. Because her practice does not produce value and hence is not defined by utility, it is able to intervene in time – it does not belong to history. History is written about wars and discoveries, not about the everyday life. While in the traditional interpretation, Penelope weaves out of loyalty to her husband; in Cavarero’s reading Penelope weaves to resist being absorbed by a history in which her space is anomalous.

The task of Penelope is not to make cloth but to create her own time-space. In a similar vein, the task of pussy hat knitters is not to make hats, but to craft relationships and communities that can form alternative spaces of resistance. The pussy hats project demonstrates how the unpaid and unrecognised work, typically carried out by women, can intervene in the public sphere and empower us when our rights once again might be contested.